


What Fate Steals: A Study In Noah Czerny

by you_always_liked_the_strange_birds



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, This is basically just a drabble that sounds very nice but makes little sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 10:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18519271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/you_always_liked_the_strange_birds/pseuds/you_always_liked_the_strange_birds
Summary: Seventeen years isn’t much, and it seemed even the universe made exceptions at the death of a child.





	What Fate Steals: A Study In Noah Czerny

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, peeps!
> 
> Just a quick author’s note before you read:  
> This fic is very vaguely based on the book How to Make Friends with a Ghost by Rebecca Green, and is supposed to read kind of like an article or report about Noah written by a supernatural investigator, or something like that. I don’t know how much sense this actually makes, but it’s essentially just a character study with some personal interpretations thrown in!  
> Uhh, also! It’s been a while since I read The Raven King, so if I got any details wrong, I apologize in advance.

Death is as fragile as anything can be, yet merciless in its inevitability.

This was the first thing I concluded upon beginning my research of Noah Czerny, as well as, perhaps, the harshest thing I was forced to realize. 

Of course, most of us approaching adulthood have already familiarized ourselves with the idea that the end of life is our inescapable final destination. Meanwhile, a younger person's view on it may be that it's something more fleeting, independable; that death can be a state of mind as much as a state of being. 

Those deeming themselves Older and Wiser might say that deciding to see it this way is simply a sign of naivete, or adolescent edge. But to those people I regret to inform that there is some truth to the, so-called, naivete they frown upon. 

You see, in death people are normally forgetful. As their heartbeats slow, so too does their memory. The details of our lives are grains of sand in relation to the persistance of death: they slip through the spaces between our fingers until all but what is vital remains. 

But Noah Czerny  _ remembered _ . 

If his name sounds familiar, that may be due to its recent appearances in several national newspapers. It wasn't long ago that the seven year old mystery surrounding the sudden disappearance of Aglionby Academy student Noah Czerny came to a close when four friends discovered the remnants of his bones while scouring the West Virginia mountains.  A string of horrific revelations were revealed, and as these news reached the public, even the most stoic among us were troubled by the awfulness of what had taken place. Many found themselves in mourning once again, hearts aching as they realized that the hopeful wishes they had whispered into their pillowcases - murmured tales of runaways and new, happier lives in other cities - had never been anything more than just that. 

The four teenagers responsible for finding Noah, however, were rendered confused. For months they had lived alongside him, interacting with him as they would with any friend.  How was it that a dead boy could fool everyone around him into believing he was alive?  My employers suspected the answer ran deeper than simply the unsuspicion of the living, and so I was sent to investigate. 

The day I sat down to interview Noah was remarkably grey and uncustomary for summers in Henrietta. Raindrops played chase down the wide windowpanes spanning the walls of Monmouth Manufacturing, and the beams overhead creaked in protest against the wind. Perhaps it was just the weather working as a stark contrast, but immediately I was struck by how animated Noah Czerny seemed. Throughout my career as a researcher of the supernatural, I've encountered many individuals which could be classified as apparitions, and all of them had one core trait in common: How awfully dull they were. Stale and unresponsive; a challenge to carry a conversation with. Noah Czerny, however, was a marvelous portrait of life, constructed with a precision so near flawless all it missed were his eyes. Even I found it difficult to remember that I wasn’t speaking to a person as much as the vague outline of one.

Where other apparitions' shoulders had gone slack with unuse (due to the fact that the dead are, usually, entirely uninterested in having a functioning bone structure), Noah's were as reflective of his shyness as any living person's would be. (This, I noted by the way he sat with his shoulders drawn up to his ears: a memory coded in life, communicating that he wouldn't have been completely comfortable answering questions concerning the circumstances of his death even when alive.)

When talking about his friends, the corner of Noah’s mouth twitched into a smile: a soft, friendly expression that defied the brutality the dark smudge across his cheekbone spoke of.

As he recounted the events leading to his death, his knees bounced up and down, feet tapping anxiously on the concrete floor.

Even now, I hesitate to call Noah Czerny an apparition. His absence of a heartbeat did nothing to strip him of his vigour. Inexplicably, he managed to cling onto life while seeming to bear no mind that doing so was, by all scientific recognition, supposed to be impossible. 

I theorized that this peculiarity was a consequence of his life having been robbed from him before it had even really begun. Seventeen years isn’t much, and it seemed even the universe made exceptions at the death of a child. 

 

When (making an attempt at) speaking with apparitions, it isn’t uncommon for me to have trouble imagining these statues of insubstantiality to once have been people, strikingly alive beings with personalities as complex as my own. But with Noah Czerny, I was instead amazed that I didn’t have much trouble doing that at all. 

Noah had been fiercely imaginative during his lifetime, being the mind behind Aglionby Academy’s annual Raven Day celebration. 

Although much of his creativity and imagination had been lost to death, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the Noah that had woken up in the middle of the night, awe-struck with a head full of flurrying wings. I suspect the inspired ramblings he amused me with during our interview couldn’t have sounded too different when he was alive. (I can’t imagine even a living boy being capable of more enthusiastic hand gestures.)

In one newspaper article, his mother is quoted as saying: “My son loved everyone and everything. I’ve never met anyone who loves life more than he did.”  As I did some basic research to prepare for my interview, this saddened me more than anything else. 

The dead are classically anxious to phase out of existence. The world is, after all, a uniquely vibrant place to be, which can be tiring for those rendered blank by decay as they tend to fare better in other planes of existence. 

I was certain Noah would be the same, and it felt like a fist pressed to my heart. 

These days, the present is so woefully uninhabited. The young have no choice but to worry for the future, and the old are too stubborn to let go of the past.  To think that Noah Czerny’s lust for life had vanished too felt an awful lot like losing faith. 

As I spoke to him, however, I realized that Noah was still as enthralled with life as he had ever been. 

One thing he was especially fascinated with, I concluded, was food. 

Noah, alive, was always hungry in the way typical of teenage boys. And even though Noah, dead, did not eat, he still managed to have our conversation drifting time and time again to the topic of food. 

The following food items he expressed a particularly exuberant appreciation for: 

  * Honey (but only the BillyBee kind, in the bear-shaped bottle.)
  * Edible glitter (although, he assured me, he found regular glitter just as exciting.)
  * Pop Rocks (as I deduced from my interview, made a sound when you put them in your mouth that was sure to make him laugh hard, hard enough to have him doubling over and holding his stomach in a mannerism so profoundly living that forcing yourself to remember that he was, in fact, dead was both incredible and so, so sad.)
  * Colored rock sugar (as introduced to him by his dear friend Blue Sargent, one of the many inhabitants of 300 Fox Way: a partial home, partial psychic business. Noah had never seen the strange sugar prior to when Blue had handed him a stick and told him to swirl it around in a cup of tea. He told me he took great enjoyment in watching the tea turn the faintest shades of pink, or orange, or blue. The more vibrant, the better. Noah Czerny loved things that reminded him of life.)
  * Birthday cake (At one point, I asked him to list off five things that made him happy. I was curious on how he’d go about answering the question. Before answering, he corrected me. He explained that he could never be truly, vividly happy again. The mechanics of emotions were long since lost on him. But he told me that some things were better at reminding him of what, at least, the bare-bones of happiness felt like, and so I asked him to list off five such things instead. Among the things he listed were snow globes, gas station toys, the green children’s umbrellas with the frog eyes, bubbles and birthday cake. “Birthday cake,” he said to me, “makes people happy. I mean, think about it. Have you ever seen someone eat cake without smiling?”)



Another thing I noticed was how Noah’s every word seemed punctuated by affection, as if when death stripped him of everything else, it granted him in apology as much of his love and loyalty as it possibly could. 

It seemed as if everything he said circled back to his friends by the way he so quickly retorted all blame from the description of his own murder with a  _ He was my friend _ , and excitedly dived into retellings of the things he’d done that week with a  _ So my friends and I… _ .   

He was unflinching in his love for them, no matter if it was at his own expense. Noah Czerny belonged to a special brand of bravery distinguished by self-sacrifice. 

As I spoke to him, laughed at his jokes, marveled at his ideas, I nearly became consumed by the illusion that I, too, was becoming his friend. He was, after all, such a warm soul. It was hard to convince myself of the fact that that’s all he was: a soul. Nothing but a hollowed-out impression of what he’d once been, like a footprint in the dirt. 

This realization came to me like a wave of icy water as it dawned on me that Noah did not seem to have a will of his own. The little he did have seemed only to be an extension of his love, or a limb carved from his loyalty. He only wanted what his friends longed for, only feared what his friends feared in secrecy. 

Noah Czerny was, at his core, nothing but an embodiment of fate, only extending as far as to the people directly involved with his particular branch of it. 

I knew what that meant even as I wished I didn’t. 

Fate, dear reader, is stubborn. It wants, and it takes, and it does what it has to in order to fulfill its own purpose. Disasters turn into inevitabilities. Deaths turn into life lessons. 

I knew, in time, that fate would take Noah Czerny, too, for the second time. 

 

As a last note, I must apologize for not supplying you with a more satisfying end to this dire tale. All I can give you is a bit of advice, which you may take as you will: Apparitions can make intoxicating company, but it serves to remind you that being friends with a ghost often means you have to mourn them twice. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Hello again!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this (or at least managed to suffer through it)! I wrote this mainly just to prove to myself that I could do it, so I'm sorry if my writing style got a bit convaluted at times. Anyways. I should stop apologizing. 
> 
> I hope you have a great day, and thank you for reading! :)


End file.
